I know this post is supposed to be about new approaches to social distancing. I promised I will get to that if you bear with me. Plus, bears will come into play, sort of, before I am done.
Despite the pandemic, those of us with our five senses more or less intact can enjoy nature and our immediate environment. Hearing beautiful music. Seeing a spectacular sunset or just the smile on a loved one’s face on Zoom. Smelling chocolate-chip cookies baking. Tasting those cookies, sizzling sausages, or sweet chilis. Touching your dog’s soft fur. Each sense in in its own unique way enhancing our experiences of life. Or not.
My spouse claims I have a sense of smell as good as a bear. He heard on one of those National Geographic’s programs that a bear’s sense of smell is ten, or a hundred, or some multiple, times keener than a dog’s. I suppose he means by this exaggeration that I should count myself lucky. My husband needs to set a timer if he’s cooking, and have me sniff the milk to see if it’s gone sour. On the other hand, I can tell by smell alone when those chocolate-chip cookies are ready to come out of the oven. I could have picked our sons from all the other babies at the hospital nursery by smell alone. You get the picture—not exactly bear-like. But I do tend to notice smells.
Today I do not feel at all lucky to have a good sense of smell. Our collie was skunked when I let her out in the yard late last night. The poor dog was dripping skunk juice from her face when she ran back to me.
She must have seen the skunk from our deck because she flew off of it and chased the critter until crashing into our fence. Sometimes I wish my sight were as keen as my sense of smell. Even with the outside lights on I didn’t see any critter.
After the too close encounter with the skunk our dog and I took a midnight shower. Again, despite not feeling all that lucky, we had a bit of good fortune to still have de-skunking shampoo from long-ago skunk encounters by a previous collie. And even more amazingly, my spouse could locate said shampoo on short notice.
Until the pandemic we had grown accustomed to having our dog bathed and brushed by a groomer. Our technique for showering a large collie dog came back to us. I got in the shower first. My spouse pushed our recalcitrant and extremely smelly, 70-plus-pound dog into the shower with me and closed the door. After I bathed her I let her out to be dealt with further by my spouse while I thoroughly showered and scrubbed myself.
It was well after midnight by the time we had washed everything our dog or we had come into contact with. Even though our still-skunky smelling dog was relegated to sleeping in sunroom with the windows opened and the door to the rest of the house closed, I had trouble sleeping because of the skunk smell.
My at-times-saintly spouse got up early and walked skunky dog and then gave her a second bath, utilizing a method very similar to what we had used the night before. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I drank a cup of coffee, which was ruined by the persistent skunk smell, and went back to bed.
I now have taken a second shower with scented body wash, washed my hair thoroughly, put just about everything into the washer again and have sat down to tell you the best way to social distance. I doubt anyone with a nose will want to get within 20 yards of us. But I empathically do not recommend it as your first choice.
Happy skunky 4th from us. I’ve had more than enough fireworks. I sure hope yours smells better than ours.
